Electoral reform for all the wrong reasons

The Senate has always been undemocratic. It is, in fact, undemocratic by design.

7pm TV News NSW

There are plenty of ways the Australian electoral system should be reformed. But such reforms should aim to foster new voices, as opposed to silencing them, writes Jeff Sparrow.

In the aftermath of the Senate result, there's been all sorts of calls for electoral reform in Australia. But many of the proposals push in precisely the wrong direction.

The success of eccentric microparties proves, we are told, that the Senate's undemocratic.

But how, exactly, is this news?

The Senate has always been undemocratic. It is, in fact, undemocratic by design.

The architects of federation were never particularly enthused by the whole popular will thing, as evidenced by their constitutional preoccupation with the governor-general, a position drawing its authority from the divine right of kings, in a mandate substantially less compelling than that of even the craziest microparty.

If we're talking of reform, there's a good place to start, as Gough Whitlam might attest.

Indeed, the Senate was constructed in an overt and conscious affront to the basic principle of 'one vote, one value', offering each state, irrespective of population, the same number of representatives. Though this was justified as a protection for the smaller states (in a debate, incidentally, in which both factions invoked the defence of White Australia), from the very start senators voted by political affiliation rather than geographical origin, meaning that the flawed structure has always served to deliver a skewed representation to those parties that polled well in the smaller states rather the big population centres.

Again, plenty to reform there.

But that's not what we're talking about.

On the contrary, many of the critics seem aghast that the Senate gives representation to smaller parties, which is, in fact, its most democratic characteristic.

Let us be clear: most of the time, the Australian political system overwhelmingly favours the two major parties.

In the House of Representatives, Adam Bandt has retained his place. While this is generally regarded as a breakthrough for the Greens, they still hold less than 1 per cent of the seats, despite having receiving 8 per cent of the vote.

Indeed, if you look at the current predictions for the lower house, only four places will go to parties other than the majors - a figure that suggests 97 per cent of Australians support the big parties, something which simply isn't true.

In the absence of parliamentary representation, small parties are largely excluded from the media, which means that voters don't hear about them, which means, in turn, they stand less chance of winning parliamentary representation.

It's a Catch 22 that works well for Labor and Liberal… but not so well for democracy.

Back in the day, the two party system at least gave voters options reflecting underlying philosophical differences between Labor and Liberal. But today the old political institutions are increasingly dissolving, something apparent in the prevailing cynicism during the election.

The starting point is that neither Kevin Rudd nor Tony Abbott is liked or appreciated.

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The next common theme that quickly emerges across all the groups in all cities is that voters have trouble finding compelling policy differences between the two main parties.

It's not so much that they don't know what the parties' policies are. The groups touch on quite a few. It's more a case that many of the parties' policies have converged to the point where they have become hard to tell apart.

Consider the election debates. Rudd and Abbott and several of their senior ministers faced off against each other on several occasions. But because, on most policy matters Labor and Liberal disagree more about execution than principle, the contests immediately devolved into ritualised rhetorical exchanges rather than a contest of ideas.

The climax came with the clash between Tony Burke and Scott Morrison about repelling refugees, an issue on which the parties have marched, entirely in lockstep, off to the far Right.

That episode illustrates how, despite its inherent flaws, the Senate can play a positive role.

For, whatever you think of the Greens, insofar as there's been a parliamentary debate over asylum seekers it has not between Labor and Liberal so much as between the two major parties, on one hand and the Greens, on the other. And that's largely because of the Senate, which provides the Greens a public platform they would not otherwise possess.

Now, that's not to argue there's nothing problematic about a collection of microparties gaining representation via mysterious preference deals, and in the absence of publicly available policies.

Yet there's a disturbing anti-democratic tone to the sudden calls for Senate reform, a distinct whiff of disdain that anyone other than insider politicians might darken the doors of that chamber.

No, it's not a good thing if we're mandating people by tricky preferencing. But demands to increase the difficulties in registering a party or for a hike in the fees that would-be candidates must pay or other such measure of that nature are, quite consciously, attempts to restrict the democratic process to the bigger players.

And that matters.

In recent years, we have seen increasingly the political class reaching a consensus quite at odds with the views of the rest of the population. Think about the war in Afghanistan: overwhelmingly unpopular among voters but scarcely even a question for debate among politicians. Think about same sex marriage, where the people have moved far ahead of the politicians.

Of course we should reform our archaic political institutions. But we should do so in order to foster more views, not to silence them.

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland literary journal and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence. On Twitter, he is @Jeff_Sparrow. View his full profile here.